How Prometheus compares to other Kubernetes monitoring tools
Prometheus is a widely used monitoring tool in Kubernetes environments, but it’s not the only option available. Here’s a comparison of Prometheus with other popular Kubernetes monitoring tools:
1. Prometheus
Pros:
- Open Source and Community-Driven: Prometheus features considerable support and is entirely open-source, ensuring continuous maintenance and improvements.
- Flexible Query Language: Prometheus Query Language, or PromQL, is a powerful and flexible query language for metrics.
- Wide Ecosystem: Provides an extensive list of exporters for different services and integrates well with Grafana for visualization.
- Kubernetes Integration: Offers comprehensive Kubernetes-specific metrics obtaining and native support enabling service discovery.
Cons:
- Scalability: May be hard to manage on an extensive basis in absence of additional components like Thanos.
- Limited Built-in Visualization: Grafana is required for advanced and user-friendly dashboards.
- No Long-Term Storage: By default, it fails to provide storage for a long time data
Kubernetes Prometheus
With modern DevOps becoming more and more complex, monitoring and alerting stakeholders has become even more crucial for any microservice, and Prometheus is a tool to do the same. Prometheus is a completely open-sourced tool created to monitor highly dynamic container environments like Kubernetes, Docker Swarm, etc. However, it can also be used in a traditional non-container infrastructure where you have just bare servers with applications deployed directly on them. In this article, we will learn what prometheus is. We will see why Prometheus is so important in such infrastructure. And what are some of its use cases?
Table of Content
- What is Prometheus Monitoring?
- Why use Prometheus for Kubernetes monitoring?
- Prometheus Architecture
- Key Terminologies
- Tutorial – Deploying Prometheus Monitoring in Kubernetes Cluster
- Step 1: Creating a Kubernetes Cluster
- Step 2: Installing Helm
- Step 3: Adding the Prometheus repository
- Step 4: Installing Prometheus
- Step 5: Checking all the resources installed
- Step 6: Expose the “prometheus-server” Service
- Advantages of Prometheus
- How Prometheus compares to other Kubernetes monitoring tools
- The challenges of Prometheus scaling and monitoring
- Increased management overhead for SREs and platform teams
- Prometheus Kubernetes Service Discovery
- Conclusion
- Kubernetes Prometheus – FAQ’s